16.8. Exercises¶
You’re going to write a function that takes a string as a parameter and returns a list of the five most frequent characters in the string. Eventually, you will be able to do this sort of problem without a lot of coaching. But we’re going to step you through it as a series of exercises.
First, the function will count the frequencies of all the characters, as we’ve done before, using a dictionary and the accumulator pattern. Then, it will sort the (key, value) pairs. Finally, it will take a slice of the sorted list to get just the top five. That slice will be returned.
Step 1. Suppose you had this list, [8, 7, 6, 6, 4, 4, 3, 1, 0], already sorted, how would you make a list of just the best 5? (Hint: take a slice).
Now suppose the list wasn’t sorted yet. How would get those same five elements from this list?
Now take a list L and make a dictionary of counts for how often these numbers appear in the list.
Now sort the keys (numbers) based on their frequencies. Review Sorting a Dictionary if you’re not sure how to do this. Keep just the top five keys.
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Finally, generalize what you’ve done. Write a function that takes a string instead of a list as a parameter and returns a list of the five most frequent characters in the string.